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How Much Does It Cost To Find A Higgs Boson?

Yesterday, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that its Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle that’s consistent with that of the Higgs boson. This is an important discovery because it verifies the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson. Although there are a lot of different subatomic particles, the Higgs boson is of particular importance because it’s what, according to the Standard Model, gives everything in the universe its mass.

Much as we’d like to believe that science can be done by lone geniuses, toiling in their basement laboratories, the fact of the matter is that discovering the fundamental secrets of the universe doesn’t come cheap. For one thing, the only way to discover subatomic particles like the Higgs boson, an extraordinary amount of energy is needed. That’s because in order to find the Higgs boson, you have to accelerate a proton to nearly the speed of light – not an easy task.

To get that acceleration, the scientists at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider, which is buried under the French/Swiss border. It’s a circular path that’s about 16.8 miles long and about 330 feet below the surface. The Collider has about 9,300 magnets, which are super-cooled to -456.25 degrees Fahrenheit. This enables the Collider to get protons to 99.99% of the speed of light. The protons run through six different detectors, which run different experiments and the amount of electricity that powers it is incredible – 120 Megawatts – about as much as all of the homes in the neighboring Swiss Canton of Geneva.

The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN – about $286 million annually. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year.

The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion. That’s a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that. The money itself is provided by the CERN member countries, and a little over 70% of the annual budget is provided by Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and Spain. The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia.

Of course, that money isn’t only being spent on finding the Higgs boson alone. There are a number of different experiments being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider, which include the discovery of other subatomic particles, as well as experiments geared towards studying the still unknown territories of physics, such as Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

There’s no doubt that these experiments will not only unveil more of the mysteries of the universe, but also enrich our technological capabilities. Building the Large Hadron Collider alone forced engineers to develop new techniques and push existing ones to their limits. CERN itself is responsible for your ability to read this article – the world wide web was developed in part to provide a means for the international community of physics to talk to each other. And the LHC generates so much data that new methods of computing and data crunching are being developed to handle it. What’s more, advances in particle physics from the LHC are leading to the advancement of medical imaging.

When you combine the potential for advancing computer technology, medical imaging, and scientific breakthroughs, $13.25 billion seems like a bargain. Especially when you consider the fact that on top of all of that, the Large Hadron Collider and its associated experiments are bringing us that much closer to understanding the mysteries of the universe.

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The stated cost of the Cern operation that discovered/proved the Higgs Boson particle seems minescule to the 2008 U.S. bailout of the Wall Street gamblers. The Higgs Boson provides a wealth of important future possibilities. Obviuosly, nothing was learned from the Wall Street fiasco.

So, I hear that the effective mass of Higgs Boson is near that of a Iodine atom. OK, are there just large Higgs Bosons and smaller ones exist? Or, are really trying to say that all mass represents quantum integer multiples or slices of a Higgs Boson?

I’ve only read enough of the Wikipedia articles to be 90% sure on this, but I’m pretty sure the flaw in your reasoning is assuming that mass *comes* from the Higgs Boson.

Read these sentences a few times: “…credited with the prediction of the Higgs boson and Higgs mechanism which provides the means by which gauge bosons can acquire non-zero masses in the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking.” ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_papers “This mechanism may also leave behind elementary scalar (spin-0) particles, known as Higgs bosons.” ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism

So the Higgs Boson is a particle predicted to be created in the mass-creation process. Since it is so high-energy I’d guess there is just a very low chance of a particle being created in some instance, and this is why atoms aren’t all heavier than Higgs Bosons.

From a quantum perspective, this may be closer to the truth: Higgs bosons are about 134 times heavier than a proton, so on average 0.74% of protons have a Higgs Boson–after all, things average before they reach our macro scale. (But I’m also inclined to say this is still thinking about how mass works completely wrong! The answer relates to spontaneous symmetry breaking…)

Didnt realize it cost that much to have it up and running! I commented on a similar Yahoo article, that my main gripe with the discovery is that is took an extra 10-12 years to discover. Had congress back in the 90′s given the OK for the SCC in Texas which would have been about twice as big as the LHC we could have found the Higgs and variants of it some time in the late 90s-early 2000s!Its a shame that we did spend a couple of billions getting it started though, and now its just a datacenter! What a waste…on the flip side though the money that would have gone to the SSC went to NASA for the Space Shuttle mission, and had that money not gone to them then maybe today we wouldnt have all the Space Travel companies trying to get started up…